The present invention relates to a combined dock seal and shelter.
By way of background, there is now in common use a dock shelter construction in which the side members consist essentially of narrow vertical wood frames mounted perpendicularly to a building wall and which have flexible stay-reinforced fabric flaps affixed to their outer edges which provide sealing engagement with the sides of a truck. These prior shelters required steel guards to prevent a truck from backing into the wood frames and destroying them. Furthermore, even in instances where the truck did not contact the wood frames, if the truck was sufficiently off center, it could bend the stays beyond their elastic limits and thus permanently distort the shelter. The foregoing situation has become more pronounced with the advent of trucks which are 81/2 feet wide as compared to the maximum prior dimension of 8 feet wide.
In addition to the foregoing, a prior art construction consisting of foam side flaps mounted on foam side panels is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,213,279. However, this patent relied primarily on the bending between the side flap and the side pad for providing sealing engagement. However, because of the softness of the foam material, the seal which this prior art structure provided was not as tight as with the structure of the present invention, and further the bending forces were of such a nature which could cause rapid deterioration in the areas of bending.
In the past, foam cushions of triangular solid shape were used as seals between the building wall and the bottoms of the side flaps of dock shelters. However, the intermittent extreme compression of the foam cushions caused them to deteriorate rapidly in use, with the attendant necessity to frequently replace them.